Nostalgic memories of MIT Manipal

I just happened to think about the back old days when I was in college in MIT Manipal. I happen to find a few videos on YouTube of the college where I used to study back in those days. I saw the videos and realized so many things have changed in and around the campus in these years. The main block, and the other block which we used to call the new block (its not new anymore), the library block, the workshop blocks where we used to learn carpentry and metal fitting in our first year of university and last but not the least the off college hang outs, all these have changed considerably. All this creates and feeling of nostalgia within me. This also sometimes makes me feel sad about the fact that I did not have easy access to Internet technology then, to put up my memories on the Internet forever. Actually, Internet and having a computer at home were a very big and an immensly expensive affair in those times which actually are not long gone.

I had to put some of these up here so that I can get back to them when I need to.

This is another good video about life in Manipal:

It is a real challenge to keep in touch with all my mates from college. All have spread far across the globe. Even in this Internet age, I find it hard to keep in touch. But, I do try hard to keep in touch with as many people as I possibly can.

I don’t know how many of you are in touch will your mates from college?

Microsoft releases SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2

It is here and ready for download. Microsoft has officially released SQL Server™ 2005 Service Pack 2. It can be downloaded from here.

Books Online available here. 

Cheers

SQL Server 2005 SP2 will be available soon

Microsoft seems to be almost there with SQL Server™ 2005 Service Pack 2. The RTM should be available soon, real soon. Although they have not set a date yet, it should be released very soon.

For more information visit the following links:

• James Manning
• Benjamin Jones

To know what is new in the Service Pack 2, click here.

 Edited:

I came accross this link that claims its going to be released today (19th February 2007). So, I believe it should be out anytime now.

SQL Server 2005 SP2…… When???

It has been almost a year since SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released. And now many of us are waiting for the release of Service Pack 2 (SP2).

We found an issue with SQL Server 2005 SP1 last week. It started with the following error in the application which was running seamlessly for every other operation except for one operation, when it was running on SQL server 2005 SP1.

Fatal error 3624 occurred at Feb 5 2007  2:34PM. Note the error and time, and contact your system administrator.

A severe error occurred on the current command.  The results, if any, should be discarded.

Location:  IndexRowScanner.cpp:370
Expression:  m_sizeOfBuffer > currentOffset + colLen
SPID:   54
Process ID:  2712

In the beginning we thought it may be something in our application. But when I checked the process ID in the task manager it turned out to be SQL server 2005 process. The SPID was the application server’s connection to the database.

Immediately we turned to the wonderful SQL Profiler, and this is what we saw:

SQL Server Assertion: File: <IndexRowScanner.cpp>, line=370 Failed Assertion = ‘m_sizeOfBuffer > currentOffset + colLen’. This error may be timing-related. If the error persists after rerunning the statement, use DBCC CHECKDB to check
the database for structural integrity, or restart the server to ensure in-memory data structures are not corrupted.

Warning: Fatal error 3624 occurred at Feb 5 2007  3:00PM. Note the error and time, and contact your system administrator.

2007-02-05 15:00:23.04 spid54      Error: 3624, Severity: 20, State: 1.
2007-02-05 15:00:23.04 spid54      A system assertion check has failed. Check the SQL Server error log for details

We investigated further to find out the point of failure. We found that there were certain SQL statements that were being executed against the database because of which SQL server was throwing the assertion error. The common things between these statements were the table being used in the statements and the fields. To be more specific it was to do with all the bit fields in the table. Some of the statements were updating the bit fields, and in some statements the bit fields were part of the where clause. Even a simple statement like SELECT MY_BIT_FIELD FROM MY_TABLE was failing with the same assertion error.

We then went into the MSDN forums and learnt that there were issues with bit fields that have been fixed as part of the SP2. So, I installed the SQL server 2005 SP2 Community Technology Preview (CTP). And to our luck our problem was resolved.

Now the question was, when will SQL server 2005 SP2 RTM be available? I learnt from Jim that it is expected in the first quarter of this year. This means it should be available anytime in the next three months. I hope Microsoft will release it as scheduled. For more information about the same Jim pointed me to SQL Server Manageability Team Blog.

Hope this helps you.

Hurray! All blogger posts imported

Hurray!! Finally, wordpress has given me what I wanted before I moved completely to wordpress and that is importing all my posts (not a huge number though) from my blogger blog into here. This is really great. Now I hope to bid good bye to blogger and continue blogging here. Thanks very much guys.

I had a few javascript problems during imports on Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). But I managed it alright with FireFox.

I did have to edit a couple of posts as wordpress says a big NO to javascripts in posts. I had a few flickr badges that use javascripts and they were not showing up. So I had to remove them and set them as links to the albums on my flickr.

End result is that I am quite happy with the results and I would continue on this amazing arena.

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog on wordpress. I have been blogging on blogger till now until Tom told me about wordpress. This is really cool and I like the settings and ease of publishing posts on wordpress.

I started this blog with an intention of moving all my blog posts from blogger to here. This was not possible as I upgraded my old blogger login to my google email account. Later I learnt that wordpress could not import blog posts from the new blogger that uses the google email logins. This put me off a bit.

The one new thing I learnt today is that we could publish blog posts on blogger as well as wordpress from Microsoft Word 2007. This is a real cool feature of Word 2007. The only problem with posting on blogger is that it (blogger) does not accept images from Word 2007 or for the matter of fact, from any other publishing tool I reckon.

So this is my first post on my new blog directly from Microsoft Word 2007. I hope to get all my posts migrated from blogger some day. I hope to blog regularly here. I am still in two minds, whether to discontinue blogger and make this my primary blog. And until I make up my mind, I would still keep my blogger account active.

Here is the snapshot of Word 2007 blog publishing tool.